I have long been one of those writers whose sole desire is to generate a prolific body of work that will amuse, influence and keep the masses busy until the world dies - a metalheaded Dickens who isn't boring, if you will. But the aforementioned quote - a gem penned by Terrorizer staff writer Gregory Whalen that Century Media has decided to affix to every single copy of the CD that rests on the dusty shelves of your local heavy metal peddler - has sparked an epiphany that has coerced me into questioning my whole raison d'être, as far as writing metal reviews is concerned. To elaborate, what was once a compulsion for quantity has now evolved into a quest for succinct quality - pages and pages of rolling words jampacked into a highly quotable catch phrase or a snappy sentence.
So here it is. My shot at supersonic blurbdom. And while brevity has never been my forte, let me try my hand at a few one-sentence reviews in an attempt to abandon this tiny cubicle here in cyberspace to which I'm relegated, a last ditch effort to launch myself towards heavy metal immortality:
Perhaps my calling
still alludes me, but until that time, I'll continue to write in my trademark
digressive, verbose style. Which reminds me - this is a review of
the new Emperor album.
Yet once again,
I'm at a loss, much like my ill fated attempt at brevity a moment ago.
What could I possibly write that those of you who have sifted through the
heaps of printed praise for IX - Equilibrium have not already read?
Like the vast majority of Emperor's oeuvre, Equilibrium
is extravagant, yet to an even greater degree than its predecessors, which
may very well emanate from the black metal pretensions and conventions
that the band has risen above yet still retains to an extent. In
other words, the album is an aural tapestry that maintains a dignity and
a class, regardless of the guitars granted a place front in center in the
mix, piled atop the raging and anguished screams of Insahn, layered above
the atmospheric keyboards that soar above Trym's racing double bass and
constant drum fills.
Excessive? Maybe. But this is the type of excess that undergirds the pure and titillating spectacle that is extreme metal. And while attempts at being this full throttled and multilayered usually end up sounding pathetically clusterfucked and incomprehensibly sloppy, Emperor is blessed with masterful recording, forging a sound utterly over the top and excessive - there's that word again - without losing the subtleties that lie inconspicuously within the music: a string arrangement here, a beautiful keyboard piece there accentuating - not overpowering - the racing and grating guitars. Throw into the mix Insahn's various vocal deliveries, ranging from prototypical black metal screams - on the opener, "Curse Ye All Men," - to classical opera - "An Elegy of Icaros" stands out in this regard - and death metal growls, and you have a metal album that defies classification, a black-death-power metal hodgepodge that never loses its core identity through the course of the songs.
In short, Emperor
just might have created the near perfect extreme metal album, the CD of
the year, if not the decade. And while a blurb such as that may not
possess the zing of "Emperor gleefully impales its crass imitators on black
hot cocks of burning steal," it will have to do. Just like my overextended,
pointlessly analytical reviews.
